Today Smashing Magazine turns eight years old. Eight years is a long time on the web, yet for us it really doesn't feel like a long journey at all. Things have changed, evolved and moved on, and we gratefully take on new challenges one at a time. To mark this special little day, we’d love to share a few things that we’ve learned over the last year about the performance challenges of this very website and about the work we’ve done recently. If you want to craft a fast responsive website, you might find a few interesting nuggets worth considering. – Ed.

Improvement is a matter of steady, ongoing iteration. When we redesigned Smashing Magazine back in 2012, our main goal was to establish trustworthy branding that would reflect the ambitious editorial direction of the magazine. We did that primarily by focusing on crafting a delightful reading experience. Over the years, our focus hasn't changed a bit; however, that very asset that helped to establish our branding turned into a major performance bottleneck.

Successful developers all have something in common: the desire to create. To fully realize that creativity, they need to continually improve their skills. The web industry has grown from this desire to learn. You only need to look at the unwavering demand for conferences, workshops and training days for evidence of this.

For many companies, however, these sources of training require time and money that simply might not be available — especially when you consider that technologies evolve all the time. The cost of continually sending your team to workshops and training days can quickly become unsustainable.

There’s a false belief in the web development community that CSS animation is the only performant way to animate on the web. This myth has coerced many developers to abandon JavaScript-based animation altogether, thereby (1) forcing themselves to manage complex UI interaction within style sheets, (2) locking themselves out of supporting Internet Explorer 8 and 9, and (3) forgoing the beautiful motion design physics that are possible only with JavaScript.

Reality check: JavaScript-based animation is often as fast as CSS-based animation — sometimes even faster. CSS animation only appears to have a leg up because it’s typically compared to jQuery’s $.animate(), which is, in fact, very slow. However, JavaScript animation libraries that bypass jQuery deliver incredible performance by avoiding DOM manipulation as much as possible. These libraries can be up to 20 times faster than jQuery.

In the early days of mobile, debugging was quite a challenge. Sure, you could get ahold of a device and perform a quick visual assessment, but what would you do after discovering a bug?

With a distinct lack of debugging tools, developers turned to a variety of hacks. In general, these hacks were an attempt to recreate a given issue in a desktop browser and then debug with Chrome Developer Tools or a similar desktop toolkit. For instance, a developer might shrink the size of the desktop browser’s window to test a responsive website or alter the user agent to spoof a particular mobile device.

Making an application work offline can be a daunting task. In this article, Matthew Andrews, a lead developer behind FT Labs, shares a few insights he had learned along the way while building the FT application. Matthew will also be running a "Making It Work Offline" workshop at our upcoming Smashing Conference in Freiburg in mid-September 2014. – Ed.

We’re going to make a simple offline-first to-do application with HTML5 technology. Here is what the app will do: Store data offline and load without an Internet connection, allow the user to add and delete items in the to-do list, store all data locally, with no back end, and run on the first- and second-most recent versions of all major desktop and mobile browsers. The complete project is ready for forking on GitHub.

Aspiring to beauty in our designs is admirable. But it doesn’t guarantee usability, nor is it a product or marketing strategy. Like “simple” and “easy” before it, “beautiful” says very little about the product. How many people, fed up with PowerPoint, cry out in frustration, “If only it were more beautiful”?

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And as designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd.

This creativity mission has been going on for six years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for September 2014. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper!

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Meet Smashing Book #5, our new book on real-life responsive design. With front-end techniques and patterns from actual projects, it's a playbook to master all the tricky facets and hurdles of responsive design. Save 25% today.

Fixing RWD issues can be quite easy — once you understand exactly why they come up. The Mobile Web Handbook will help you understand technical issues on mobile and how to deal with them effectively.

Hungry for more content? Over 60 eBooks are waiting to be discovered in our lovely Smashing Library. And guess what? You can watch Smashing Conference talks there, too.

SmashingConf isn't the eighth wonder of the world, but we are pretty close. Join us at at the shores of Santa Monica for SmashingConf LA on April 27–30 or at SmashingConf NYC on June 15–18. You won't be disappointed.